Matches my experience as well in the hobby gamedev realm. I can give an anecdote, I’m involved in a “private server” dev community for an old niche MMO from 2003. There exists 3 codebases: first the original code written in a windows-style C++ with heavy use of inheritance, custom collections, Hungarian notation, etc. The second is a collaborative open source version that is written in a naive/basic C++ style (e.g. c w/ classes) and the third is a from-scratch reimplementation in modern C++ with all the bells and whistles, cmake, heavy use of templates, etc.
Despite the modern c++ version being the highest quality and the original windows-style version being the most fully featured, the vast majority of people use and prefer the rinky-dink basic c++ version. Simply for the reason that you don’t need to be a senior level dev to contribute meaningfully to the code.
That's not really giving the full picture of ROSE online!
- The official server (arcturus) is awful to work with code-wise. But all the decently big private servers uses it because at one point we only had the binaries of it and it worked out of the box. When the source started to leak too, it was easier to continue forward with that thing.
- The "simple version" which I am assuming you refer to is os(i)rose. This was the only thing you would get BEFORE the official server got leaked. It had some momentum simply for being there since roughly 2006. It was based on Brett19's code which at the time was a 14-something teenager. The same brett that now works on a fully modern C++ codebase that is decafemu.
- The Modern C++ version which if I remember is worked by few folks from osrose came out something like 2 years ago. Passing 2015, the momentum for the game is close to none. So yes, no one will even spin that codebase.
The official server was stolen due to horrible code-practice (C++-wise and software engineering in general), like having plain SQL-injections when creating characters. Worst! This was one of the reason that made the company (TriggerSoft) behind the game go bankrupt. The game was full of security holes back in 2005. This made the game's economy being broken due to few cheaters, created few horrible roll-backs and such. This drained the player's base from the game.
The "simple C++ server" osrose was also plagued by security issues and technical issues. Up to a point that people preferred to patch the official server with dll-injections + assembly rather than trying to make this "simple C++ server" work.
So, naive code attracts naive programmers? I'm not sure this is the ringing endorsement you take it to be.
I should also add that Hungarian notation is the prototypical example of dumb, verbose code, that wants to make individual lines easier to understand by dragging type information into every single variable name.
> I should also add that Hungarian notation is the prototypical example of dumb, verbose code
If used wrongly. Joel Spolsky wrote a whole post on it[0], but the TL;DR is that you should use the notation to differentiate between variables of the same type. For example, you might have world coordinates and object coordinates in a game script. Correctly used Hungarian notation would denote them, for example, with `wPosX` and `pPosX`. Even though they're both int (or float), you can easily see that you shouldn't assign one to the other.
Using them to notate types, however, as in `iPosX`, is completely useless. I fully agree with that.
There is no need for Hungarian notation because types are way too complex in C++ for that. On top of that, an IDE tells you right away the type if you want.
Could be Lineage 2, at least I am aware of multiple private server implementations there. And it came out in 2003. But then again it's far from being a niche game.
Despite the modern c++ version being the highest quality and the original windows-style version being the most fully featured, the vast majority of people use and prefer the rinky-dink basic c++ version. Simply for the reason that you don’t need to be a senior level dev to contribute meaningfully to the code.